THE WAR ON WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 33, 8 February 1935, Page 4

THE WAR ON WAR

WELLS ON THE OUTLOOK

LESSON BEING DIGESTED

"Many of us—and I am one of the sinners—have talked too freely, and without sufficient explicitness, of the World State. A World State, as lib-eral-thought conceiyes it, will not be anything like a national state magnified to planetary dimensions. It is not to be thought of in that way. It will be something quite different, said Mr. H. G. Wells recently, reports "Public Opinion." "I do not see any 'World President' and 'Parliament of Mankind' coming into being in the future. . League of Nations at Geneva is much too like a Parliament of Mankind, and that is one of the reasons for its impotence.

"But I am at one with most serious liberal thought nowadays in desiring to see a permanent monetary and credit conference, a world transport board with complete control of the air, and an industrial and agricultural council, overriding and setting aside the internecine nationalistic conflicts that now waste and destroy our lives. They will not be. consultative bodies; they will be legal, fully-empowered bodies, entrusted with full authority. It is along these lines that hope will presently return to mankind.

"Of course, you cannot change human institutions without a corresponding change in human minds, and beneath the struggle to bring about these new world arrangements there will have to be a mental warfare on the most intense and far-reaching scale Everywhere, in schools, ' colleges, books, newspapers, pulpits, radio talks the conception of the New Scale of dealing with human affairs must be spread, incessantly. STUPIDITY AND PREFERENCE. _ "That campaign is beginning, but it is still only beginning. There is a vast resistance of honest stupidity and prejudice to be overcome, and much scoundrelism lurking by the way. There is a. gigantic task before the persuasive factors in human life. The idea of a New Scale has imposed itself enormously upon the-more activeminded, of us in the twenty years since 1914, but it has still to be made a primary conception in common thought throughout the world. It is the major fact of contemporary history. As we get it clearer, we shall be able to make it clearer to other people; "When it has been fully grasped, and its political, social, and mental implications begin to be realised, then we shall be entering upon a new phase in the history of our race. We shall realise better than we do now that, after all, the Great War w,as the beginning of the end of human fragmentation; that it was, at any rate, the opening phase of a process of convulsive adjustment which will ultimately abolish war. The adjustment is a vastly bigger and more difficult job than we. realised in 1914; there may be some huge jars and dislocations still ahead, but it is going 0n.... "I am quite prepared to believe that there are Governments in the world senseless enough to declare war, but I do not think there remain any Governments in the. world with the moral force.and the intelligence to hold a war together as the Great War was held until 1918. . I believe this is more widely known and understood than our old-fashioned military authorities like to think. NOT "INEVITABLE;" "I am not one of those who believe in any more 'inevitable', wars. Man is not perhaps a very reasonable animal, but he is not wholly an instinctive one. In the light of the obvious, he is capable of reasonable collective action: Thirty or forty years is a big piece of a human life, but it is only a page in human history. The lessons of the war are still being assimilated, slowly but surely. Who can say, in the world today, whether adjustments may not win out in our present discords and perplexities? Who dare deny even now that the Great War of 1914-1918 was not only the first but the last World War?"

War is a horrible thing, and, after the events of 1914-1918, anybody who attempts to paint it in the colours of the old bravura, the old picturesque trappings of peacetime soldiering is doing a real disservice to his fellowmen," writes Sir John Hammerton.